Clear Linux Gets Questions Over Steam Integration, Other Plans For This High-Perf Distro
Auke is a long-time Intel Linux developer and also one of the prominent contributors to Clear Linux going back to its early days. Among the highlights from Wednesday's "ask me anything" included:
- When asked about Fedora's flicker-free boot process, Auke pointed out that it's made possible in part through work spearheaded at Intel around the frame-buffer/fastboot code worked on by their graphics team. While it's great the shared work happening, from the Clear Linux perspective they are more focused on achieving lightning fast boot times over a slick boot process. But they may look into it in some aspect moving forward, but their priority is just to have a quick booting system.
- There aren't any immediate plans around supporting offline installations with their installer fetching bundles on-demand and also a desire to serve the latest updates, especially in cases of security updates. Auke notes that Clear Linux is "fundamentally an 'online OS' to begin with" and as such aren't focused on offline installations at least for the time being.
- Auke did acknowledge pain points in currently trying to dual-boot Windows 10 and Clear Linux on the same system. There are improvements to be made to the Clear Linux Boot Manager as well as related GRUB2 handling and so hopefully this will come in due course.
- As for whether Intel plans for Clear Linux to become a normal desktop Linux distribution, Auke commented, "Well, you can look at it from two angles: First, one of Intel’s motto’s is “x86 everywhere”. That’s the first clue. Second, from the people who work on Clear Linux, we really don’t want to “switch” to a different distro once we’re done working, so, there’s the second hint. There are a few applications where we know we just won’t see Clear Linux get used, and that’s OK, but most generic purpose - yeah, we want to support it. That totally includes gaming, office, etc..."
- When asked about the Linux-Steam-Integration to improve Steam on Linux, in part with the work done by Ikey, unfortunately there isn't much happening at the moment. For now they don't have the resources to commit to the Linux Steam Integration and even Steam issues currently with Clear Linux. They will accept patches though otherwise may consider a proper third-party software add-on.
Read more at community.clearlinux.org.
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